Festival Ballet's emotional, sensual Carmen Although the gypsy girl Carmen is most familiar from the 1875 opera of that name by Georges Bizet, local audiences have also become acquainted with the Carmen performed by Festival Ballet, which was commissioned by them and first appreciated in the 2003-04 season.

Photos: The Slutcracker 2010 The Slutcracker: A Burlesque takes its sexy Nutcracker makeover to the Somerville Theatre through December 24, 2010.

Festival Ballet's emotional, sensual Carmen Although the gypsy girl Carmen is most familiar from the 1875 opera of that name by Georges Bizet, local audiences have also become acquainted with the Carmen performed by Festival Ballet, which was commissioned by them and first appreciated in the 2003-04 season.

Photos: The Slutcracker 2010 The Slutcracker: A Burlesque takes its sexy Nutcracker makeover to the Somerville Theatre through December 24, 2010.

2009: The year in dance You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.

The real deal Nineteenth-century ballets are not all alike. But Boston Ballet's Sleeping Beauty is the real McCoy.

Reality riffs When Jerome Robbins's New York Export: Opus Jazz boogied onto the scene in 1958 then took Europe by storm. Created for Ballets: U.S.A., a company of ballet, modern, and jazz dancers that Robbins had put together for a government-sponsored cultural exchange tour, Opus Jazz was a kind of spinoff from the 1957 hit musical West Side Story , which Robbins directed and choreographed.

Here’s looking at you Set in the usual small village — this one in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe — Coppélia might look like just another pleasant 19th-century ballet about a boy, a girl, and another girl. But appearances can be deceiving — and that’s theme of this work, whose title character is a life-size mechanical doll.

Happy returns George Balanchine didn’t go in for productions of the old classic ballets.